You guyssssss I felt a profound sense of satisfaction for completing the Three Weeks challenge and very much enjoyed my long weekend after an exasperating work week only to discover I had one post left! Oh noes!
Fortunately,
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runpunkrun and mific gave me something to post about! They did an awesome mcshep collab while I was away and what a treat! So awesome to have terrific art and podfic and story as one. Like the fandom days of old *sobs in old-timey* It was a marvelous distraction from my usual hobby of staring in blank horror at the news. Speaking of which...
I beg everyone to please contact your senators about the Big PoS Bill! For too many reasons, but also because I just found out it includes sneaky provisions that completely undermine the judiciary, including *retroactively* making previous rulings and court orders unenforceable! Such as, oh, orders to return US Citizens and illegally deported immigrants from overseas gulags. The administration is angry at the lower courts for ruling against them, so they are trying to use Congress to render the judiciary impotent. See Section 70302 of One Big Beautiful Bill Act 119th Congress (2025-2026). Not to mention, of course, the bill raises taxes on the poorest, adds trillions to the deficit, drops the tax on gun silencers (what?), chops SNAP, medicare, and medicaid, and lines the pockets of the already wealthy with more and more tax cuts. I want to puke.
If you live the US, please CONTACT YOUR SENATORS and tell them you are so very against this Big Ugly Bill for more reasons than can be counted. Tell them to kill it or they will smell your vengeance come midterms.
Thanks, my friends.
I spent most of the weekend catching up on sleep and reading/writing fanfiction, although I did manage to watch a few new-to-me movies here and there which was a nice plus. My plans to play video games fell through, mostly due to my concentration being shot my first few days off. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to play, but I couldn't drum up the energy to actually open a game and start playing, so I just... didn't.
Still, sleeping and reading with some movie watching isn't bad. I'll take what I can get.
My legs are sadly still a bit of a mess from my fall on Friday. The left one is just bruised and a little scraped, but my right ankle and knee both continue to have swelling in addition to similar scrapes and bruises as the left leg. Add in the psoriasis on both of them, and they both look pretty horrifying at the moment. While I'm limping some, I can still walk, so I'm counting that as a win.
Like Real People Do by xiaq/E. L. Massey was a pretty good fanfiction for the very good webcomic Check Please! By Ngozi Ukazu (who btw has a new book coming out and it’s gonna be so good), that then filed off the serial numbers and got republished as an original novel by a real, small press, with an editor and everything.
Except for some reason the only changes made to the version that was published as a fic on AO3 were the character names (for the characters originally in Check Please!) and some biographical details of not!Jack and not!Bitty. Jack Zimmermann became James Petrov (JAMES?! JAMES?!?!? We’ll get to that later), Kent Parson became Alex Price, Eric Bittle became Cody Griggs, etc, etc. Vegas was changed to Houston and Samwell, in a decision that feels like a personal attack against Me Specifically, was changed to Princeton.
It doesn’t really work.
As I said on social media, in a fanfic, you can just cut to the fun stuff without having to bother with any setup because the setup was already done for you in the source material of whatever you’re fanfictioning. You don’t need to describe Samwell in a Check Please! Fic because the reader already read the webcomic, they know what the campus and the Haus look like. In your original novel you do need to describe Princeton (and the unimaginatively renamed “house”) at least a little bit because your original novel readers will not have that context.
I was surprised when the airport was only a 20 minute drive but I guess they flew in to Trenton? Not gonna fact check if they have Houston to Trenton flights but I’m pretty sure Frontier does not do first class. I was also surprised that when visiting a town, or even like, the American north for the first time, the viewpoint character (as far as there is a viewpoint anyway, we get very very little introspection on either Eli or Alex’s parts) does not have any inclination to describe it. Or the “house.” I was expecting to see at least one line about the ivy covered buildings on campus, or at least a namedrop of the main fucking street, but nope. Which grocery store did they even go to was it the fancy Italian place or McCaffrey's or what. They get “Boba Teas at the coffee shop on campus” which is not a fucking thing you have to go to one of 5+ bubble tea shops directly across the street from Princeton Campus if you want a boba tea, because Princeton is a specific, distinctive, REAL PLACE THAT EXISTS AND YOU DIDN’T CARE ABOUT IT!!!
Ok Princeton Local sidebar over back to business.
Eli and Alex both feel like side characters in their own story– because they're barely changed versions of an OC and a minor antagonist in a fanfiction of something else.
It’s fine that we don't get a lot of interiority from Eli or Kent Parson in the fanfic because the reader just wants to see their blorbo Kent get with the perfect boy for him. In an original novel, the barrier to caring about Eli and Alex is higher. It feels odd how peripheral Eli's skating career or college friends are to the story, while Alex's hockey stuff is at the forefront, but it makes total sense in a Check Please fanfic because no one comes to a fanfic for the OCs, they're here for the characters they already know and like from something else.
I feel like to make this story work as a novel, it needed a lot more editing than it got. I read the fic version before it was taken down, and every single scene and line of dialogue was basically unchanged from what I remember reading on AO3. Even the parts that pissed me off. Actually those parts got worse.
Enter James.
French Canadian hockey dad haver Jack Laurent Zimmermann became Russian-American hockey family scion James Petrov (now with two older brothers, Eric and Mark, which are actually ok names for second gen Russian Americans to have). JAMES!!!
Most immigrants I know at least tend to name their kids things that are easy to pronounce in both their native language and English, which is why almost every Russian American boy I've ever met was named Anthony, Alexander, Daniel or Ben. (Which makes it extra funny that the American character is named Alex in his story lol). Or something Jewish because Russian Jews. No Russian parents would ever name their kid James, because there is no J sound in Russian and you want grandma (and in this case probably the Russian sports press too) to be able to say your baby's name properly.
I was willing to let this slide under the assumption that James is a second generation immigrant without strong ties to his country of origin, but then he's described as switching to Russian when he's angry, having a slight Russian accent (because Jack Zimmermann has a French Canadian accent) and as wanting to play for Russia in the Olympics (very weird, if you know you're queer already, and it's some year between 2014-2022, and your parents probably left Russia for a reason!) So like. Why tf would his parents give him an English-English name.
Additional Russian nitpicks I remember from the fic version that are still in the book version: no one makes their own pelmeni for fun unless they're masochists because the grocery store version is literally fine and diy pelmeni is a lot of work for not enough reward, the Russian word for recipe is pronounced “recept” so idk why someone would substitute it for “cooking plays” in a conversation, blini are usually eaten with savory toppings or with jam, not “strawberries and a pale pink sauce”... I don't understand why like. If you're getting tradpubbed. You wouldn't do your due diligence on this part at least. Find a Russian and ask a few questions. Blah
The other book I read that was filed off fanfic did a lot of edits, preserving the best jokes but also merging, removing and changing the genders and nationalities of characters, restructuring scenes and plot points, and adding new things entirely (and toning down the romance by a lot because this was a Russian slashfic and the censorship hammer came down hard). It was a very good fic and a very strong original book!
I wish the author of Like Real People Do was willing to be edited more.
There are thousands upon thousands of men and women across the country's military branches who have given their lives in defense of the nation, or as victims of the country's necessary and unnecessary wars. This day is complicated, especially for someone who grew up in Canada, where solemn remembrance of such losses are marked on Nov. 11.
Over the years, I've come to mark Memorial Day in two ways. I honor those people, so many of them young, who gave the last full measure of devotion in wars. And I also remember people who I lost. So here are two essays I wrote in previous years.
*** *** ***
Memorial Day: It's Complicated
( It's complicated. )
*** *** ***
I Remember: A Personal Memorial Day
( I Miss Them )
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/GrimHollow
Really not my sort of thing at all, but possibly of interest to some of you.
I just posted the last story for the hurt/comfort series! I started writing this sometime in... February? When I was just trying to find the joy of writing again in the middle of personal and world overwhelm. And slowly, I got back to where I wanted :) As noted by a friend, the series has 25 stories (which is absolutely coincidental but I will pretend was Totally The Plan, 25 for 2025 yay XD), and nearly 40k words. I think one of the things I wanted to teach myself with the series is also that not everything has to be edited to death. Everything having to do with editing started to feel like an gigantic, impossible ordeal after how long it took for the original novella.
I have some ideas about what I'd like to work on next (back to the Cursed Witch, hopefully! 🤞), but we'll see what happens :)
The Thief is still so great! A small, self-contained story compared to everything that will happen after and IMO stronger for that. I love Gen so much, what an obnoxious little trickster. He's so smug of his own cleverness and is constantly DYING to tell the others how clever he is but cannot. I love everyone in the road trip (oh, Pol), even Ambiades whom I believe could've redeemed himself if given the chance, though chances are in short supply.
The book does make me miss that we don't get this deep into Gen's headspace ever again (unless Return of the Thief does, I haven't read it) and elements of it are so cinematic I wish we could get a live-action TV show or movie out of it, just for those scenes. Specifically, the water mechanism of the temple under the Aracthus, and Gen's entering Hephastia's court and realising that what he thought were just statues were the actual gods themselves.
( Cut for length, plus other spoiilers. )
Yes, I am but a tiny speck on this globe, and my successes and failures are as unimportant as can possibly be imagined. Still, one takes one's victories where one can find them, she said pretentiously.
First the bread. I went back to a Kitchen Aid recipe for two loaves of white bread. I'd previously had minimal success with it, but I wasn't going to fool around with a completely new recipe, and potentially lose more ingredients, a la yesterday's whole wheat bread failure (I'm not going to call it a debacle, because I've learned from it.)
I was pleasantly surprised, to put it mildly. I paid a great deal of attention to the heat of the liquid into which I was supposed to put the dry yeast, and I'm embarrassed to say that was something I previously failed to do well. And surprise! The bread came together and rose beautifully, not just during the first rise, but during the final rise. They're now out of the oven and they look spectacularly ordinary, which was what I was aiming for. Huzzah!
The second bit of success was within the field of my latest obsession, the KPop group called Ateez. Like SKZ, they have eight members, and they debuted just a bit later (Oct. 24, 2018) than Stray Kids (March 25, 2018). The two groups are very friendly, despite working under different entertainment agencies.
Ateez songs, choreography, and lore differ noticeably from SKZ; to my ears, they're just a hair rougher than their hyungs. Both groups have labored under peoples' view of them as noisy, and I think that's one of the reasons they appreciate each other. But I digress. I was trying to find videos of one or both weekends they performed at Coachella 2024. It was difficult, but the KPop subreddit came to my rescue. And since Bob agreed to watch one of the performances with me, I now have something to show him. Again - huzzah!
- ateez,
- food,
- home stuff,
- k-pop,
- woo-hoo!
It's been five years since George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin. Little has changed, except to get worse.
The racist rot runs deep in this country - arguably it's one of the rotten support beams holding the United States up. Perhaps we can change that, and create support beams that partake of justice, but these days I'm not overly optimistic.
I remember George Floyd. I mourn him, at least in that way that a strange white woman can mourn him. I hope other strange white women, and white men, and others who aren't Black Americans can also mourn. And perhaps starting working for something better.
them: We operate out of Location A and Location B. I'll be at Location A Saturday afternoon from 2:00 on.
me: Great, I'll be at Location A a few minutes past 2:00 on Saturday!
me at 2:15 pm: Hey, you're not here yet so I'm going to run a quick errand and come back.
me at 2:30 pm: You're still not here, so I guess we'll try again next week? I hope everything is all right on your end.
them at 3:00 pm, after I was already home again: We're at Location B.
It's not a huge deal, we will connect next week, but damn, I would have appreciated even a perfunctory "Oops, my bad," you know?
Out of the blue, the AI chatbot started messaging me this weekend, and WOULD NOT GO AWAY, and so I had to search online to find the exact sequence of commands to make it shut up. Since then, I've found other tutorials that I think have turned it off completely, but I'm going to keep working at it, just in case they try to slip something through.
Anyway: I hate this "AI" crap so much and I am extremely tempted to revert back to a basic flip phone just so I don't have to deal with this shit, except that somehow having a smartphone became mandatory, and it all really sucks. I don't really use my phone for much except calls and messaging, but I have resolved to get better about learning how to use it for other stuff in case I need it... and because it's the only way to get rid of all the crap they keep foisting upon me! But suffice to say I'm really pissed about it.
I've loved so many of PAD's books and comics over the years. MadroX and X-Factor (v3) will forever be one of my favorite Marvel runs of all time. I read his Centauri Prime Trilogy so many times, not to mention "Soul Mates" is one of my favorite Babylon 5 episodes.
There was a period of several years where I was utterly obsessed with his Star Trek: New Frontier series. Imzadi will forever be one of the most influential Star Trek books that baby!me ever read.
He's played such a huge role in my life over the decades. He'll very much be missed.
The Temple, by Stephen Spender
This was the first great book that I’d finished in what felt like a long time. I loved it. It also felt like I was completing part of my literary collection in reading it, as I’ve read Auden and Isherwood before, and now I have Spender as well.
The Temple is a thinly-fictionalized account of Stephen Spender’s youth spent living abroad in Hamburg, Germany. It opens on him as Paul (all real figures have been given aliases), badly managing an early infatuation with a fellow university student. His poems about this crush lead to friendships with Auden and Isherwood expies as well as a man named Ernst Stockmann, who is a friend of one of the college deans and soon becomes an admirer (romantic, artistic) of Paul. Ernst invites Paul to spend the summer of 1929 with his family in Hamburg. Germany was then an escape from censorship and the anti-homosexuality laws of Britain, and both Auden and Isherwood were already making use of this. Paul, their disciple, seizes on the invitation to launch himself there.
( Read more... )
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Auden or Isherwood, who is interested in queer or Jewish experiences during the Interwar period, or who enjoys autofiction. It’s one of those rare books in which a queer author, late in life, has outlived the profanity laws which stifled their younger writing and can finally see it published. That alone makes it a story worth reading.
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
Where does one begin when a novel occupies so much space in the modern imagination? It is night-impossible to escape some peripheral awareness of The Secret History as a reader of campus novels. The book’s fame and accolades have only been augmented by the past decade’s creation of Dark Academia—literary trend, clothing style, digital aesthetic. In such a context, a book cannot only be a book.
Despite all of the forces against it, The Secret History is a very good book. It tells the tale of a group of college students studying Classics at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, modeled very much on Tartt’s own undergraduate experience at Bennington College. (This is, by the by, how I first encountered the novel: the Esquire piece from 2019 got shared around to me as a liberal arts grad. I read and enjoyed it at the time, but wasn’t moved to read any of the novels mentioned.)
( Read more... )
The Bacchae, by Euripedes
When embarking on a new genre, I never know how to write about the first work I encounter. That’s a bit of a lie—I think that I read Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata in high school. I certainly don’t remember particulars. The sum total is that, in reading The Bacchae, I am both unsurprised by and unfamiliar with its conventions. I’ve seen the form, but I have no meaningful context for it. I’ve spent years circling around the classics by reading those old Victorians and Edwardians, and so I’ve grown a sense of their consequence, a certain era of their cultural cachet and meaning, and read my share of one-off poems. But to sit with a long piece, one of the great tragedies, is a different task.
( Read more... )
We had a young friend over for supper tonight. He's a reporter I've known for a few years. He's very good at what he does, although I sometimes wonder if he fully realizes it. He is an immigrant, whose family came to the U.S. when he was fairly young, and he's worked through some challenges, and done so very well, in my opinion. He recently became an American citizen.
I put together some slow-cooker beef bourguignon (well, it started that way, but I added a lot more than just red wine, plus vegetables that don't normally go into that dish), and an orange cake, put the place generally to rights, with Bob's help. I'd hoped to dust the living room, but Bob got the carpet vacuumed, and that made the place presentable.
For a wonder, everything was ready when our friend got here. It's been some time (as in, a few years) since we've had him over. We truly are hermits; we have friends who we haven't interacted with for horribly long periods of time ... anyhow, last week I ran into him at a social event for people who work for one of the local online news outlets I do stringer work for. He was feeling fairly down for various reasons, and asked if I could give him a hug. Well, that did it for me; I had to have him over for supper.
We had a really enjoyable time with him, for a couple of hours, and then I had to bring the evening to a close. The physical reason was because my back was starting to suggest that I should find some heat or ice as soon as possible. The mental and emotional reason was that I abruptly lost every one of my remaining spoons and I needed to be alone with Bob, STAT.
It happens to me, and to Bob. We still enjoy entertaining people, albeit not nearly as much as we used to, when we had a larger place, but it's always been tiring, and these days it's even more so. Entertaining people means you have to put your own best foot forward; you have to be on, in order to make sure your guests have a good time, to make sure you're listening to them, to make sure you're not talking too much at their expense, and so much more. And yes, you work hard to present yourself as an excellent host.
It is fucking exhausting. It's fun, but only for a given amount of time. Once that last spoon is gone? It's time to beat a determined retreat.
And that's what I'm about to do. Painkillers and heating pads, ho!
I do not believe this far-fetched story because 1. I don't see Freddie as a faithful diarist and 2. Unless there are also secret recordings, he never wrote songs about this beloved child, or about beloved children, or about children. He wrote songs about cats. He wrote songs about Mary. He wrote songs about men. No "secret child of my heart" song? 3. Entire story of secretive child who wants this news out there while remaining private is ridiculous.
I sort of wish it was true. I will probably read the book anyway. But I really can't believe it.
What about y'all? Am I being too skeptical?
ETA: I meant to post this to
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freddiemercuryfans but posted it here by mistake, but I guess that's OK. 